MISCmedia for 1/8/01
Body and Soul

LAST FRIDAY, we began a talk about how passe pop-culture genres are reguarly given an extra lease of life by being remarketed toward born-again Christians. Then we mentioned one particularly passe pop-culture genre (pornography) and how a Christian (or at least spiritual) focus might revive it.

That simple gimmick led me to pondering a whole bigger question--how to bring sex, and a healthy respect for it, back to Christendom.

This might seem either double-icky or sacreligious to some of you. I assure you I don't intend to be either.

After all, many of the world's great religions and cultures have embraced strongly sexualized images and messages--including the Euro-pagan cultures Christianity borrowed so much else from.

What I imagine, in 3 parts:

• 1: Artistic works supporting a lusty, zestful, sensual, playful faith.

• 2: Rituals (either in person or shot on video) in which couples, individuals, and even groups perform sexual rites dedicated to the greater being, to the interconnectedness of God's creation.

• 3: Stories and essays describing sexuality, sexual acts, and sexualized relationships in this context. they could range from the high-literary to the low-paperback levels.

Examples and precedents from over the centuries:

• The sexy parts of the Bible, natch; from Ruth and the Song of Solomon to the various tales of seduction, masturbation, revelry, nudity, and such.

• The fetishist elements of old Catholic and Orthodox art; Mary's pink full-body halo.

• The raunchy, fleshy tradition of The Canterbury Tales.

• The whole history of "naughty" religious-themed storytelling in art, prose, verse, and film, in which storytellers have tried to force sex back into religion, often with fetishistic, violent, and deliberately sacrilegous visions. Naughty nuns, naughty priests, naughty Catholic schoolgirls, naughty Victorians, eroticized versions of classic sacred iconography, etc.

• The examples of sex-spirit integration in the cultures and traditions Christianity borrowed pieces of itself from--Hebrews, Greeks, Celtics, et al.--and in some of the world's other great cultures.

• Some of the recent prosex interpretations of Judeo-Christian teaching. These range from the mild spirit-body reconciliations of Thomas Moore's book The Soul of Sex to the outspokenly gay-friendly advocacy of L. William Countryman's Dirt, Greed, and Sex: Sexual Ethics in the New Testament.

• More generalized sex-and-spirit advocacies, from George Battaille's Erotism and The Tears of Eros to Rufus Camphausen's Encyclopedia of Sacred Sexuality.

• A scene in the sketch-comedy film Amazon Women of the Moon, spoofing a centerfold video, in which the model is shown nude, in church, in a pew with her dressed and respectful parents.

• The closing of Russ Meyer's last film, Beneath the Valley of the Ultravixens, in which a radio faith-healer having ecstatic sex in her studio, to the strains of "Gimme That Old Time Religion."

TOMORROW: The last of this for now, I promise.

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